


All possible entendres

by akajed



Category: Supernatural
Genre: 6.20, F/M, Gen, M/M, Referenced drug/alcohol abuse, Their love was real, canonverse, raking leaves, references to seasons 7-15, s6, the physics of angel/human connection
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-13
Updated: 2021-02-13
Packaged: 2021-03-13 15:20:11
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,859
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29403984
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/akajed/pseuds/akajed
Summary: It happens when he’s in the garden, and it seems like such a small thing. He feels the sun on the back of his neck. He realises he can’t remember the last time he felt anything with such intensity. He rubs his neck impatiently as if to brush it off, but the warmth spreads across his shoulders and down his spine, light and ticklish as feathers, and for a second or two he forgets his own rules and allows himself to enjoy it.Some thoughts on how Dean survived the year he spent with Lisa, from the point of view of Castiel and of Lisa
Relationships: Dean/Castiel, Dean/Lisa
Kudos: 4
Collections: Their Love Was Real: a Destiel & Saileen Fanworks Challenge





	All possible entendres

It happens when he’s in the garden, and it seems like such a small thing. He feels the sun on the back of his neck. He realises he can’t remember the last time he felt anything with such intensity. He rubs his neck impatiently as if to brush it off, but the warmth spreads across his shoulders and down his spine, light and ticklish as feathers, and for a second or two he forgets his own rules and allows himself to enjoy it.

Then he feels sick; he pushes away the feeling, thinking he should shove it down into the bottom of the freezer where he keeps the rest of the dead things. He gets on with the task at hand, clearing the autumn leaves from the lawn.

_And yet, slowly, gently, the hollow space inside him has started to let in light._

Much, much later, he remembers that the sky had been overcast all day, the sun hidden behind grey clouds.

. . . . .

Lisa glances at him while he dries the dishes that evening and wonders again what’s going on in his head, and whether she wants to know. He’s told her he likes doing things around the house – even if he still has no idea how to mow the lawn properly – and she tells herself it grounds him, helps keep him connected to reality in some indefinable way, but it’s clear that he’s just finding a way to avoid dealing. After he got sacked from the garage for drinking on the job, she had sat down with him and said that he didn’t need to work for a while, she could take on more classes at the gym, but he promised to try harder and she found him a cash-in-hand gig with her cousin’s construction firm, and he’s managing to hold it together but she knows that he’s hanging on by a thread. She knows, too, that he’s been buying god knows what kind of pills from that dodgy friend of Sid’s as well as raiding her Ambien and smoking most of her weed … Her sister keeps urging her to see a therapist and tackle her compulsion to rescue broken men, but her sister is an interfering bitch who reads way too many self-help books. Besides, he’s amazing with Ben, and her son badly needs a man in his life – someone to look up to – and she doesn’t want to scratch at the surface of this fragile thing the three of them have managed to build together because it could so easily collapse.

Lisa is surprised when he comes to bed at the same time as her for the first time in weeks. Another weird book arrived in the post today to join the pile in the sitting room, and she’d thought he’d be up late tonight reading it, spattering it with scribbled notes and underlinings. It’s a fat, heavy volume with an incomprehensible title – it looks like something he’ll need a fifth of whisky to get through and he’ll probably break something when he hurls it across the room in frustration. But not tonight. Tonight he holds her and kisses her hair, and she doesn’t push him to make love because she’s happy just to feel his heart beat as he drifts into sleep.

. . . . .

_Essentially, a human body is a sack of chemicals. Mainly six chemical elements – oxygen, carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, calcium and phosphorus – but also detectable traces of more than 50 others, all mixed up together to make a more or less workable example of homo sapiens. It’s quite possible that, in one particular human, those chemical elements could be balanced in such a way that a multidimensional wavelength of celestial intent, coming within reach of said human, might cause their body to vibrate at its resonant frequency, setting off a cascade of reactions on a subatomic level which could be interpreted by the human as the sensation of sunlight on the skin, and which, spreading more deeply, could be said to warm that human’s soul, however briefly._

_Of course, the idea that a human soul could have any other kind of enduring connection with a wavelength of celestial intent is a little insane. After all, a pure wavelength doesn’t have the equipment to care about a human, does it?_

. . . . .

That night, lying beside Lisa, he dreams. Not one of the usual nightmares, but a simple dream, in a world that’s everyday but not quite ordinary. It’s night and he’s driving the Impala again, his brother sitting beside him, alive and well, and he’s heading towards something impossible and glorious and he’s bathed in light, a golden light, glowing with hope. It feels like a good dream.

The next day he goes to work and it’s still a grind. But he doesn’t zone out once, and during a break he performs the role of being normal so well that the guys ask if he wants to come bowling at the weekend. The day passes. He saves up his dream all day so he can tell Lisa about it over dinner, but by the evening it has drifted out of his memory like a feather.

On the second night, he dreams he is alone, standing beside the Impala, a takeaway coffee balanced on its roof. He’s playing with his phone and looking at the window of a convenience store, trying to summon up the courage to go in. He has no idea what’s waiting inside, though he doesn’t think it’s a monster. As he opens the door he wakes up, fluttering with excitement. It’s not a nightmare though, not a hell echo; just a dream with an edge.

He tries to tell Lisa about the dream at breakfast but he can’t put the fragments together properly or understand why it seems so important. She looks mildly puzzled but she’s busy rounding up Ben’s baseball kit for practice and she’s not really listening. She kisses him as he leaves for work and he smiles his first genuine smile in a long time.

As the days pass, he starts to feel – not better, exactly, but as if he’s been walked back from the edge. The dreams continue but he’s given up trying to remember them, he’s just grateful they’ve displaced the nightmares. When he wakes up, details linger – an open pizza box, coffee brewing, a stream in a forest, a discarded red ribbon, the clink of whisky glasses, a cross of light on the floor of a darkened church, a dirty coat in the trunk of a car – but there’s no context for them, just a feeling that his dream-self is floating through a multiverse of possibilities. Hunting for meaning is as pointless as seeking the end of a rainbow

. . . . . .

Entendre, _French_ : _to hear, to understand. Used in English in the phrase “double entendre”, a word or phrase that might be understood in two ways, one of them usually sexual. Used in English in the phrase “possible entendres” (rare; reportedly coined by an upstart crossroads demon), words, phrases or images that might be understood or misunderstood in a variety of ways, sexual, romantic or cosmic_

. . . . . .

He begins coming to bed before midnight five or six times a week; his search for ways to save his brother, once chaotic and urgent, has become systematic and routine. In the early, desperate days, there were times when he would feel the need to drive out to a distant roadhouse late at night and pick random fights with bikers – he’d come home in the early hours and sleep on the couch so he could hide the bruises, and Lisa would pretend she hadn’t noticed. But over the months that he’s been staying with her and Ben, he’s calmed down a lot. A little stability and affection and human connection go a long way, she thinks, and she’s not entirely wrong. But she doesn’t know about the filigree of sunlight that rippled across his skin that day in the garden and how it continues to vibrate, deep inside him.

One morning he’s awake before the alarm, the memory of his dream still sharp. In it, he’s searching through his vinyl collection – the vinyl collection he’d want to have if he ever had the chance to own a real old-school record player and somewhere to keep it – and he’s looking for tracks to record on cassette. He knows he has to find exactly the right music to communicate something critically important, a message that will save the world, that will rescue everything. He runs over the details in his mind so he can remember it all to tell Lisa over breakfast, and when he does she teases him gently (how come that even in his dreams he’s such an old man about technology?) yet she doesn’t mock him outright; if he thinks it’s important, she’s sure it must mean something. He says in all seriousness that obviously, when you think about it, where else would the safety of the universe be if not the hands of Led Zeppelin, and Lisa pulls a face – there’s a lot she’ll put up with, but ancient dad rock isn’t on the list. How dare you, he responds, and in the tussle that follows she ends up sitting on his lap and when Ben comes in they have to rearrange their clothing in a hurry, giggling and flushed like teenagers.

He starts to wonder if this could be his reality one day. He knows he doesn’t fit, not really (though he keeps his gun under the bed now rather than under his pillow), but maybe if he tries hard enough, if he plays the role for long enough ...

And then one evening he goes to the bar with his neighbour and everything changes. The waitress turns out to be a monster; Sam returns from hell; Ben picks up a gun; the cycle begins again

. . . . . .

_A flashback, with vintage filter applied:_

_In the garden, a rebel angel is watching over the human he fell for. The angel – this wavelength of celestial intent in the shape of a radio ad salesman from Pontiac, Illinois – believes himself to be invisible and hence undetectable; he doesn’t realise his gaze has the power to cut through skin and flesh and bone to the soul, to fold time and memory in on itself so the future becomes a dream and the past loses substance. In just a few seconds the king of hell will reel him in with talk of happy endings, but at this moment the angel reaches for possible understandings and feels as if he can grab them out of the air. He has already been broken by caring._

_He doesn’t know that he’s about to take a first step on the path to losing himself – to losing it all. But it’s only a first step, a first attempt at loss. He has no idea there will be many, many more steps in this dance, or that the human and the angel will lose and find each other, betray and forgive each other, leave and return to each other, over and over and over and over, before the path doubles back and ends at home._


End file.
